Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940.

Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940. By Georgina Hickey. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2003. Pp. xii, 297. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8203-2333-0.)

Georgina Hickey has written an insightful cultural history of the New South city of Atlanta, and, in the tradition of scholars such as Christine Stansell and Kathy Peiss, she places working-class women at the core of her narrative. Hickey's clear, clean prose belies at first the depth of her analysis. Concerned with "issues of respectability, morality, and social order," Hickey adroitly employs iconography and public discourse to successfully intertwine race, class, and gender without privileging any one of these analytic categories (p. 3).

Following a loose chronology, she layers thematic chapter upon chapter, methodically constructing a creative case study of southern urbanization. Hickey frames her analysis of Atlanta with an opening chapter that traces the early economic development of this increasingly important railroad hub and a concluding chapter set during the Great Depression when, Hickey argues, the problems associated with the rising number of unemployed men provided a new set of symbols defining the city's cultural image.

The bulk of her book, however, focuses on the three decades that began in the 1890s. She uses Atlanta's Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills race strike of 1897 to demonstrate the nuanced manner in which black and white working-class women's visibility marked both hope and danger in this modernizing society. Over the next two decades, argues Hickey, "working-class women would try repeatedly in both individualistic and collective ways to capitalize on their newfound visibility" (p. 23). These women, mostly migrants from the rural South, hoped to carve out a better life working in the city. They met limited success, however. Their activities and at times their very existence created real and perceived dangers for themselves and a host of competing factions, including working-class men, middle-class reformers, and city boosters.

Hickey may be correct in claiming "that the basic elements of the story told in this book--contested visions of order, creating symbols to represent these contests, ambiguous views of growth--are part and parcel of urban development in general (p. 219). Additional case studies that follow Hickey's innovative methodology would help substantiate her claim. She effectively juggles myriad influences at work in this city's development, including chapters on the workplace, leisure activities, welfare, public health, and the city's political and legal systems.

Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940 works on numerous levels: as a penetrating analysis contributing to southern labor history, as a nuanced gender study, and especially as a model of cultural urban history. And, though in her preface she laments having taken ten years to complete her study, it was worth the wait. This reviewer can offer no higher praise than to admit that he will adopt Hickey's book as part of the required reading list in his American city course and seminar in the Gilded Age and Progressive era.

LARRY R. YOUNGS

Georgia State University